Shotts calling

Strangers smile for no reason. Shotts seems funny.

Little about its story is a laugh. Shotts had it hard. Mining coal was

no joke anywhere, and maybe especially not in Lanarkshire. Old Shotts

did not do a lot else. Nor did it bother enough how it might look on a

map. It might have had any one of five better names.

Shotts started as a collection of half a dozen villages, none of them

plain Shotts, which was the name of the parish. So it is a coal town

with no coal that was not a town. But it does want to be visited. It

said so in the paper last week.

An entertainments advertisement appeared about its new museum, Shotts

Heritage Centre. ''The sight and sound of history,'' the ad said. ''Now

open.'' To be exact, the new museum is less than quite new.

In a magic cave in the town library the heritage centre started last

autumn. Until now, however, Shotts has kept it mostly to itself. For the

rest of the world it last weekend put its show on the road -- a road

called Benhar, a basic name in its history.

Where the museum is used to be cottage rows that were lumbered with

the address of Shottsironworks, the least pastoral of handles any

village ever had attached to it. ''Just off the M8,'' the advertisement

said in a practical, if prosaic, way.

Since this excursion seems to be much about names, going by train

offers more. On station platforms are rich pickings.

Rattlers out of Glasgow pause at Holytown, Carfin, Cleland, and

Hartwood. Orient non-expresses from the other side dawdle through

Slateford, West Calder, Addiewell. It would be hard for any journey's

end to match such ringing intermediate stops.

But it is Shotts (that might have picked a fancier postal address from

among the founding village names of Dykehead or Stane or -- yes! --

Torbothie) that wants travellers.

While the memory of coal will haul most outsiders to the museum, it

does not hog the show. From the Benhar pit which had nine miners in the

late eighteenth century to the Northfield that was the last to close in

1960, coal cannot help but be the main theme.

Its account receives a hard working-class edge. No messing, the

villain is the Shotts Iron Co. In the beginning (from 1801) Shotts was a

company colony. The bosses owned the houses and the first shop. In taped

memoirs, recorded when he was 84, the voice of the late Sam Morrow, a

miner, recalls: ''They paid you your wages, and then you had to hand it

back for the rent.''

For a corporate hero there was the Co-op -- a good helper in bad times

(three ha'pennies off the price of a loaf) and a necessary supplier of

soup kitchens in worse ones.

In the local way of getting names wrong, the iron company was

miscalled. Its metal-working was secondary. Although it did hammer out

pots and pans, and produced fripperies like decorative lampposts, its

deep-down business was coal.

One Shottsonian (the title that local people have lumped upon

themselves) whom nobody miscries was Peggy Herbison, the constituency

MP. Other namely natives include miners' leaders Mick McGahey and Frank

Gormill; John MacGregor MP, who is the Minister of Transport (is it?)

this week; Bill McCue, who sings; actor Andrew Keir; and Jim Rodger,

football chronicler and confidant of the great and powerful.

But at the Shotts Heritage Centre the local hero may be an unknown

hero outside the locality. He was James Archibald Henderson, a miner (of

course). More, he became an actor, singer, theatre producer, and arts

administrator.

A secret of Shotts is how much it enjoyed fun and games. Gala days

started, thanks to the Co-op. It had two theatres. Music of all kinds is

a continuing pleasure. There are Highland games. There was a daftness

for dancing to the Silver Syncopators, a jazzy offshoot of the Shotts

Foundry Band.

Martine Marletta, 24, the attendant at the heritage centre, and a

Shottsonian, said: ''What has surprised me is how much of a social life

there was. There were just all those different things you could do.''

Above all is community drama, a traditional entertainment of colliery

places that in Shotts has survived the pits. Archie Henderson saw to it.

He retired from the London stage to go back down the mines and he

swished the curtains.

A Pavilion Theatre poster from 1921 boasts that the opera Rob Roy had

a chorus of 30 voices. No prizes for who played Rob Roy.

Amateur boxer was another Henderson role. In a photo he shares a ring

with the Marquis of Douglas, no less, of the coal-owning family. It

looks like a condensed snap of the class war, except the entry is

incomplete. Who got the verdict is not recorded. Shotts misses a winning

name even in its museum memory.